Miser With A Midas Touch

As scripted by David Wolper, a movie producer, the drama begins with a 1973 meeting of assorted showbiz moguls plotting the future of the International Volleyball Association, a new pro league they have created in Southern California. Looking on, a young newcomer of the button-down, conservative persuasion seems badly miscast, a callow babe among the flashy barons of the box office. Being interested in buying one of the IVA franchises, the newcomer listens impassively as Wolper, the league president, directs a discussion of several grandiose schemes that are guaranteed to loose a volleyball mania upon the land.

"We thought we were running the NFL," Wolper recalls. "But suddenly the new guy, this outsider, says, 'Wait a second. I'm not going to buy a franchise in this league. You guys don't know what the hell you're doing.' And then he proceeded to tell us everything we were doing wrong. He said all us 'Hollywood types' were spending too much money and ought to cut things down. Pay everyone a fixed rate, play in cheaper stadiums and run everything on a shoestring until we got established.

"And we said, 'Don't tell us how to run our league. We don't need your damn franchise. Take a hike.' "

Now the scene shifts to 1978 and another meeting in Los Angeles featuring Wolper and six fellow members of a mayor's committee assigned to find an all-purpose impresario to stage a little production number called the 1984 Summer Olympics, the one being billed as the first no-frills, debt-free, back-to-basics Games in modern history.

Going for someone with marquee value, the executive head-hunting firm hired to conduct the search approached such notables as Pete Rozelle and Alexander Haig. However, after surveying "zillions" of candidates in a two-month campaign that rivaled Hollywood's nationwide hunt for a lovable Annie, the search team presented the committee with a list of six finalists, none with name recognition.

Or almost none. For now, as the committee begins to weigh the qualifications of each finalist, one name on the list rings a very shrill bell in Wolper's memory. "Peter Ueberroth!" he exclaims. "He's the guy who tried to tell us how to run our damn volleyball league. And he was right. We went broke. That's the guy we need. If anyone can run a Spartan Olympics, the cheap sonofabitch can!"

And so it came to pass that Peter V. Ueberroth, age 45, prince of the private sector, the golden boy with a miser's touch, was named president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee (LAOOC).

Only in Tinseltown, the new adventure series starring Ueberroth and his dauntless Five-Ring Gang, is still in rehearsals for its grand finale two years hence, of course. And there will be many cuts and revisions between now and the time when the spectacle unfolds in the City of Angels from July 28 to Aug. 12, 1984, before a worldwide TV audience of some 2½ billion enraptured souls, or "more than half the living, breathing people on earth," as Ueberroth likes to put it.

But already the advance sales and merchandising of the big show are such a smash hit that Ueberroth—a man so laid back he's almost supine, as they say in Hollywood—was recently moved to remark, "It's working economically."

Which for him is a rave review. Indeed, in the wake of the staggering $9 billion the Russians splurged on the 1980 Moscow Games and the horrendous $1 billion deficit run up by the mad builders of the 1976 Montreal Games, the 1984 Los Angeles Games are shaping up as a model of modesty and restraint, the very mirror image, in fact, of their designer, Ueberroth.